If you attach an NgramTokenFilter to your analyzer at index and query time you should be able to query for parts of the word.

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_4_0/api/org/apache/lucene/analysis/ngram/NGramTokenFilter.html
http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_4_0/api/index.html?org/apache/lucene/analysis/ngram/EdgeNGramTokenFilter.html

The classes are available in the contrib/analyzer module.

You might want to boost edges a bit more than inner parts, start trying out with something like 3-5 grams.

Be aware, this will produce a rather large index.


      karl

13 feb 2009 kl. 10.43 skrev d-fader:

Karl,

As a matter of fact I more or less did. I'm not really into NGrams, but I read some articles about this technique and I eventually ended up at the 'Did you mean: Lucene?' article written by Tom White. To make a long story short, this solved my problem partially. I do have 2 indexes now and I've written code to extract all terms a user entered, put them through the suggestion engine and tries to be clever about what suggestion should be used. It includes that stop words are ignored, when the entered term exists for more than x times in the index already it's probably good (and thus a suggestion is not needed) and when there are suggestions available, the suggestion with the most occurences in the index is presented. After that the original query is being built up again, preserving all command codes (like ", ( ), AND, OR, etc. etc.). As said, this system works pretty well and mostly if there's a suggestion available, it's actually quite accurate, so thanks for this.

Still, it doesn't solve my problem fully. But I think I now know why Lucene can't search 'truely' partially. To find a document fast, all terms are stored with a list of documents which contain the term and when a user searches, Lucene can identify the documents by comparing the terms entered to the terms on that list, right? If so, it's understandable that a true partial search never will work, but then I just don't understand how Google manages to do this :)

Jori.




Karl Wettin wrote:
Hi again Jori,

did you try N-grams as suggested in the reply on -dev?


    karl

13 feb 2009 kl. 09.05 skrev d-fader:

Hi,

I've actually posted this message in de dev mailing list earlier,
because I though my 'issue' is a limitation of the functionality of
Lucene, but they redirected me to this mailinglist, so I hope one of you
guys can help me out :)

Maybe the 'issue' I'm addressing now is discussed thouroughly already,
in that case I think I need some redirection to the sources of those
discussions :) Anyway, here's the thing.
For all I know it's impossible to search partial words with Lucene
(except the asterix method with e.g. the StandardAnalyzer -> ambul* to find ambulance). My problem with that method is that my index consists of quite a few terms. This means that if a user would search for 'ambu amster' (ambulance amsterdam), there will be so many terms to search, the waiting time is just inacceptable. Now I started thinking why it's impossible to search only a 'part' of a term or even only the 'start' of a term and the only reason I could think of was that the Index terms are stored tokenized (in that way you (of course) can't find partial terms, since the index doesn't actually contain the literal terms, but tokens instead). But Lucene can also store all terms untokenized, so in that case, in my humble opinion, a partial search would be possible, since
all terms would be stored 'literally'.

Maybe my thinking is wrong, I only have a black box view of Lucene, so I
don't know much about indexing algorithm and all, but I just want to
know if this could be done or else why not :) You see, the users of my index want to know why they can't search parts of the words they enter and I still can't give them a really good answer, except the 'it would result in too many OR operators in the query' statement :) . I've tried using a Dutch stemmer (most of the data I'm indexing is Dutch) but that
didn't work out quite good. Furthermore users sometimes search for a
certain 'filename' and mostly they just enter a part of the name and
thus don't find anything.

I hope someone can enlighten me :) Thanks in advance!

Jori

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